Medical Research Oversight Too Lax

July 18, 1994

By all reports, the federal government is doing a lousy job of overseeing the taxpayers' investments in medical research and there's too much at stake to let the situation slide.

For one thing, the government has rights to any drug or medical device that is developed with tax dollars. This means the feds can revoke a patent that is not used in the public interest or even license a product to a competitor if it is priced too high.

For proof that such steps can work to the public's benefit, consider that the government threatened to step in when the AIDS drug AZT hit the market - and the price of the drug was cut in half.

But to intervene in that way, the government must prove federal research was used in the drug's development, and therein lies the problem: A Health and Human Services inspector general's report says the government has lost track of its own research. Consequently, Americans can pay many times more for medicines developed with tax dollars than for industry-financed drugs.

Testifying before Congress on Monday, critics of the National Institutes of Health said that the median wholesale price for company-financed drugs is $1,626, while taxpayer-financed drugs cost $4,854.

Taxol, a breast cancer drug discovered

by the NIH, costs 25 cents a milligram but is sold by Bristol-Myers Squib for $4.87 a milligram, they said. Levamisole, into which the NIH poured $11 million, costs $6 a pill to treat colon cancer but 6 cents a pill to deworm sheep.

This does not speak well for the government's oversight of tax dollars invested in medical research. In fact, it cries out for emergency treatment by the vice president's government reinvention team, which shouldn't have much trouble spotting the problem areas. For starters, the NIH allows outside scientists to voluntarily report inventions resulting from the almost $8 billion in grants it awards annually, but has had only one employee to ensure that researchers comply. Prodded by recent criticism, it assigned a second watchdog.

Who knows? Some day it may even have gotten around to assigning a third. But let's not wait and see. Any agency that hands out $8 billion without demanding a complete and verifiable report of where it went is an agency that needs a major shakeup this very day.